Backlinks – use the wrong methods at your peril

OK, this is a multi-faceted subject and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my analysis at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority – basics

The more authority your site has the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your information. The great news is that authorities trusted by people are also recognised as trustworthy by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov domain extensions. These domains imply they are authoratitive sources of content and it’s a proven fact that in the eyes of Google backlinks from these domains to your site will “pass on” authority to your web pages. Another shining example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are largely added by by tribes of people as opposed to a single marketer.

So it follows that authority is significantly influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content link to you then you inherit their influence and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your content by Google goes up.

How Google decides what is and isn’t authoritative is a guarded secret for solid reasons and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the web needs is an individual or a group manipulating the mechanisms that Google employs in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most significant technological asset of this period in history.

How not to get Authority and Backlinks

And on this thought it’s valuable to state some underhand sources and methods of acquiring backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘classify’ as negative authorities. In no particular order of severity, the common offenders are:

• Paid backlinks – web sites where people purchase and sell backlinks
• Comment spam – entries that contain links on web pages that are just not related to the main theme.
• Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
• Rapid backlink growth – there are a large selection of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden rise in the amount of backlinks is going to show up on Google’s monitoring systems, especially if it’s a recently registered domain.
• Backlinks from ill reputed sites – these are particularly destructive as you are guilty by association – need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but major press portals seem to get a lot of authority and I have definitely seen significant quantities of the same content over and over again on different web sites with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as a percentage of the results I am seeing defy the consistent behaviors I usually expect to see. More on this is in a future post….

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